Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

Sorry, I apologise. What did I say? I said Craig Kelly. I apologise—the member for Hughes. In fact, the PM said the member was doing a fantastic job. But he is undermining the advice of our public health experts, including the Chief Medical Officer, and he's undermining confidence in the vaccine campaign. He's engaging in systematically undermining confidence in our medical and scientific institutions. He's accused the Chief Medical Officer and chief health officers of 'crimes against humanity'. He's engaged in conspiracy theories about big pharma, and we heard the member for Gellibrand express his concern about the member for Hughes's Facebook page and the quantity of misinformation on there—that it's all a conspiracy and the vaccine is merely there to make money for big pharma. He pushes on about his remedies, like hydroxychloroquine.

We also saw the polling research out yesterday, from both Newspoll and Essential, reminding us of the challenge in making sure that as many Australians as possible are willing to take up this voluntary vaccine. Newspoll, for example, showed that only 75 per cent of Australians intend to take up the vaccine, and that rate is lower among some groups, as we heard—the 36 to 45 age group. That's why Labor has supported the government's information campaign, but it makes no sense that the Prime Minister would refuse to pull the member for Hughes into line for undoing all the good work they are trying to put into that information campaign.

The Australian community expects the opposition to work as constructively as we can with this government, and we will and we have consistently done so throughout the pandemic, and our approach to this bill and to the vaccine rollout will be no different. We want it to be the best rollout possible, so we will continue to push the government in areas where we have concerns, we will continue to push the government on issues of accountability and we will make sure that we can give Australians confidence in the vaccine and its rollout program.

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